Some notes on Italian ethnic adjectives

Abstract

In this paper, we deal with ethnic adjectives in Italian, arguing against the dichotomy between ‘thematic’ and ‘classificatory’ ethnic adjectives, recently assumed by Alexiadou and Stavrou (2011). Building on Manzini and Savoia (2011), Manzini and Franco (2016), Franco and Manzini (2017), Savoia et al. (2017, forthcoming), we provide a unified characterization of Italian ethnic adjectives and we take the derivational morphemes shaping this kind of items to be a derivational counterpart of the genitive adposition di (of) (and other kinds of obliques), sharing with the latter a common predicational core and a common signature. The proposal advanced for ethnic adjectives can be broadly extended to relational adjectives in general.